Dancing on the Fault Lines of History, a collection of essays written and compiled by Susan Manning, provides a unique opportunity for readers to trace the scholarly trajectory of one of the leading figures in the establishment of critical dance studies. Reading Manning’s oeuvre and its evolution over almost four decades not only was edifying for its content but also for how this collection models dance studies methodologies. The volume allows for readers to see how Manning iterates, revises, and moves with/in her research while also tracing how dance studies as a field has stretched, expanded, and grown.

Organized in three main sections that correlate to sets of keywords — gender and sexuality, whiteness and Blackness, and nationality and globalization — Dancing on the Fault Lines of History brings together some of Manning’s most well-known essays alongside two never-before-published pieces, each with the author’s own annotations and reflections. These reflections and introductions provide helpful contextualization for each essay that ground it within the intellectual history of the field and the broader historical moment. Within each section, essays are presented in chronological order from the date of publication, allowing readers to clearly understand how Manning’s thinking and scholarship has grown and changed. In reading Manning’s works together from across disparate geographies and periods (in Manning’s career and chronologically), it becomes evident that one of Manning’s strengths and critical interventions into dance studies has been her ability to reside “in between.” Manning’s historiographical skills, her uncanny gifts as an interlocuter, and her generosity towards other scholars prevent her from relying on “either/or” judgements and instead support a more capacious and nuanced reading of dance history (42). For example, in “The Female Dancer and the Male Gaze” (1997), Manning’s intervention claims an “alternate position” within feminist dance studies that “gives equal weight to the resistive and recuperative dimensions of the practice [of early modern dance]” (38). Manning recounts the argument: one camp of scholars celebrated that early modern dancers could find moments of liberation as they subvert the “voyeuristic gaze” through their movement (37). Other scholars pointed to the ways in which early modern dancers mobilized Orientalist tropes and other problematic racial identity politics, which, the scholars argued, undermined the liberatory promise of the genre. Manning maneuvers this argument with dexterity noting that “the juxtaposition of individualized kinesthetic subjectivity and generalized representational type created a dynamic tension underlying the form of early modern dance, a tension that grounded the paradoxical social function of the form” (47).

One of the many gifts of this volume is the clarity and rigor of Manning’s research methods. In her new essay “Archives in Collision: Excursus on Method” (2025), Manning instructs readers on how to grapple with what one finds in the archive, including materials that may be contradictory. Through detailed and careful historiography, Manning’s experience with “archives in collision” once again attends to the messiness and incompleteness of dance history. In holding together contradictory evidence — for example, discrepancies between print sources and oral histories in regard to how/the extent to which the Wigman School adhered to National Socialist standards — Manning “demonstrate[s]” how “the archive does not yield fixed, monolithic, and hegemonic readings…but rather rich, complex, and shifting readings of bodies in motion” (80). In addition to robust archival work, Manning also provides excellent examples of nuanced, detailed choreographic analysis from video, photographs, and live performances, such as Nelisiwe Xaba’s Fremde Tänze in the essay “Cross-Viewing in Berlin and Chicago” (2020). Her work as the dramaturge for Reggie Wilson’s Moses(es) (2013) usefully illustrates a different form of scholarly writing — that of a “critical advocate” and participant observer who is dedicated to the promotion and artistic promise of Wilson’s artistic project. The range of methods utilized across the essays of this collection speaks to Manning’s agility as a scholar and her curiosity as a learner (even as a tenured professor). Manning’s desire and ability to expand her modes of inquiry resonates clearly through the essays and the generous citations of her graduate students, collaborators, interlocutors, and subjects. At certain points, though, Manning is at times unnecessarily apologetic for her lack of knowledge about, or engagement with, a particular methodology/framework, or for theoretical shifts in the field that she could not have known about or predicted decades ago. The essays themselves reflect how her work both shapes and responds to the demands of the moment and the field across the last forty years.

Throughout all three sections of the volume, Manning also attends to questions of spectatorship and offers her model of “cross-viewing” to illustrate how audiences’ intersecting identities — racial, national, sexual, class-based, etc. — come to bear on their experience with an artist or performance. Manning argues that performance functions “as an arena within which spectators may consider perspectives other than those conditioned by their social identities outside the theater, as a cultural space where spectators negotiate their simultaneous habitation of multiple and overlapping social formations” (51). In her theorization of spectatorship, too, Manning instructs on how to limn a binary and navigate tensions. The opportunity to see these negotiations play out in different contexts and essays throughout this collection is exciting and productive.

In the last section of the volume, Manning calls for a transnational approach to dance studies that can still “integrate the nuance and detail of the nation-state approach” (205). She writes

In the section’s final essay, “Mary Wigman in Asia,” Manning provides a rich example of transnational dance scholarship. Manning intentionally aims to avoid the pitfalls of a transnational historiography of modern dance grounded in colonial dynamics. Manning acknowledges histories of unilateral extraction and cultural appropriation by white dancers in the Global North who perform and co-opt movement traditions from the Global South to which they have no claim by heritage or training. Manning deftly moves with and through this dynamic by widening the scope of analysis beyond Wigman’s performed works and shifting the focus to her transnational networks that developed through her school and professional circles.Manning traces how Wigman’s connections to dancers such as Uday Shankar, Ishii Baku, and Eguchi Takaya allowed for a more reciprocal exchange and circulation of practice and artistic development. Manning’s careful historiographical mapping reveals not only how Wigman was deeply influenced by her relationships with students and performers from Asia, but also how Asian artists “deployed Wigman’s ideas and methods for their own ends” (264).

Importantly, as Manning calls for a transnational approach to modern dance, she acknowledges that “one issue that demands collective consideration is the question of nomenclature…how far can we stretch the meaning of ‘modern dance’ without the term becoming meaningless?” (222). Given the scope of this collection and the wide range of sites, works, and artists represented, a bit more clarity surrounding terms and definitions would have been beneficial. Particularly as an annotation, pointed reflections about what “modern dance” has meant, and continues to mean, for Manning personally and professionally would have been enlightening and useful.

Susan Manning’s generosity as a scholar and as an educator shines through in this collection of essays. Her writing functions as a form of pedagogy. Manning models how to engage with complex, layered historiographical quandaries and theoretical debates using accessible, clear language that would appeal to all audiences from undergraduate students to senior scholars. This volume would be a tremendous asset to any graduate student in dance studies, theater studies, performance studies, history and their various interdisciplines, as Manning offers examples of excellent literature reviews, theoretical framings, choreographic analyses, and archival research. Lastly, Manning humbly invites future students and scholars to extend her many lines of inquiry and pick up where she has left off. She actively names and calls for examination of lacunae in the research to attend to the “transnational influences [which] work in a myriad of directions, creating hybrids and fusions that we have barely begun to fathom” (201). In a cultural and political moment dominated by individualism and hypernationalism, Manning’s writing and her generous invitation to circulate and create new connections in global exchange is needed and necessary.